Courting disaster, slangily / THU 2-19-26 / Spot to play baccarat / Medieval cure-all / Metaphor for a challenging puzzle / Japanese word that's sometimes translated as "planted in a pot" / Australian actor Eric / One-half of a golf partnership

Constructor: John Ewbank

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: LESSER OF TWO EVILS (60A: Better choice, given the options ... or the circled squares vis-à-vis the shaded ones?) — theme answers have two "SIN"s (i.e. "evils"): one regular-sized (in the shaded squares), the other shrunken ("lesser") inside a single (circled) square:

Theme answers:

• CRUISIN' FOR A BRUI[SIN'] (18A: Courting disaster, slangily) / CA[SIN]O (13D: Spot to play baccarat)
• SING[S IN] THE SHOWER (29A: Uses a shampoo bottle as a microphone, perhaps) / SAS[SIN]G (19D: Talking back to)
• BUSINES[S IN]SIDERS (48A: They may have knowledge of corporate secrets) / RE[SIN] (39D: Varnish ingredient)

Word of the Day: OLGA Kurylenko (58D: Actress Kurylenko) —

Olga Kostyantynivna Kurylenko (born 14 November 1979) is a Ukrainian and French actress and former model. She rose to prominence by playing the Bond girl Camille Montes in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (2008).

Kurylenko began her career modelling in Paris before making a transition to acting. She had her breakthrough role in the action thriller Hitman (2007) after making her film debut in the drama The Ring Finger (2005). Following Quantum of Solace, she went on to star in the romantic drama To the Wonder (2012), the crime comedy Seven Psychopaths (2012), the science fiction film Oblivion (2013), the political satire The Death of Stalin (2017), the comedy The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), the superhero films Black Widow (2021) and Thunderbolts* (2025), the Netflix spy thriller miniseries Treason (2022) and the action thriller Extraction 2 (2023). (wikipedia)

• • •

Father forgive me, for I have sinned. Twice! One of them was pretty small, though, so ... We good? Awesome, thanks. I liked this puzzle for a few reasons. First of all, I like a good rebus puzzle, and this was a really original rebus variant. Shaded squares + rebus! Two puzzle types that (apparently) taste great together. I liked how the theme unfolded for me, with the "SIN" in the shaded squares going right in no problem, but then the circled square remaining more mysterious for a bit. At first I thought there was some kind of loop or wormhole in effect. Since the first themer ends with the circled square, I thought maybe I was supposed to loop back to the first (shaded-square) "SIN" to complete the answer. The next one didn't work that way, though: if I loop back to the first "SIN" when I hit the circle, I get SING-SINGS THE SHOWER, which obviously makes no sense (unless you are turning your shower into a notorious New York prison). The way I figured out what the circled square was doing was by trying to solve the crosses, specifically CASO. "What's a CASO!? Shouldn't it be CASIN... Oh!" Since I had SASSY for 19D: Talking back to, I had missed the "SIN" square on my first attempt to cross it. So ultimately it was CASINO that gave me the full picture of the theme. First time I've ever been grateful to a CASINO for anything—thanks, CASINO! All that was left after that was to understand why I was getting this Mutt & Jeff pair of "SIN"s in every theme answer. And today, the revealer really delivered. I was calling this puzzle "Two Sins, Fat and Thin" in my head, but LESSER OF TWO EVILS is definitely better. I love when a revealer is a perfect expression of the theme gimmick—or the theme gimmick is a perfect expression of the revealer, whichever. The theme answers get weaker as they go along, opening very strong and closing somewhat feebly (hard to get excited about BUSINESS INSIDERS), but they all work just fine. So, good job today, themewise. 

The rest of the grid is harder to assess. Or rather, I'm a little ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it is admirably clean. It's got its share of tired repeaters (PSST ETRE SSN TKO BANA ALI NSA ITO etc.) but in that 6-7-8 range it's got mostly solid, real words—nothing to gripe about at all. But also not a lot to cheer. Not a lot to sit up and clap for. TOUGH NUT is indeed a metaphor ("a tough nut to crack"), but not one I would use, and it's kinda weird on its own, divorced from the metaphor. ACES HIGH is good—maybe the best non-theme thing in the grid. I don't care for CASINOs, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate ACES HIGH! After that, though, there's SEA BEDS, IGNEOUS, BONSAI, GALLONS, WRITERS, PAUPER, "NO GOOD!" ... these are all perfectly fine words / phrases, and they make for a really smooth solving experience (hurray), but there's nothing that really stands out, and the clues simply aren't helping. This is true for the whole puzzle: the cluing was quite bland and straightforward. Perhaps the thought was that the theme was (somewhat) tricky, and so the clues on the regular fill shouldn't be? I dunno. I could've used more tricky, or at least clever, or at least interesting like the SSN clue (29D: You can request a new one on religious grounds if it contains "666": Abbr.). If you look the clues over, you'll see that it's mostly phoned-in, boilerplate stuff. I've been known to complain about an overabundance of "?" clues in puzzles, but this one doesn't attempt even one!? No wait, sorry, there is 54A: Big beginning? (MEGA), but that was transparent—not exactly original or twisty. Not a TOUGH NUT! I needed tougher (or at least cleverer) nuts in the fill clues. But again, the fill itself is largely solid. Maybe workmanlike, but it's doing its job—helping showcase the theme by not being a hellish distraction.

Bullets:

• 51D: Medieval cure-all (LEECH) — this one was a little tough. It was the "cure-all" that got me. I knew LEECHes were used medicinally (as they are today), but the "cure-all" part I was not aware of. Is anything used to treat a wide range of illnesses a "cure-all"? It's the "all" that's throwing me. But LEECHes did have a lot of (supposed) applications in the Middle Ages:

In medieval and early modern European medicine, the medicinal leech (Hirudo medicinalis and its congeners H. verbana, H. troctina, and H. orientalis) was used to remove blood from a patient as part of a process to balance the humors that, according to Galen, must be kept in balance for the human body to function properly. (The four humors of ancient medical philosophy were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.) Any sickness that caused the subject's skin to become red (e.g. fever and inflammation), so the theory went, must have arisen from too much blood in the body. Similarly, any person whose behavior was strident and sanguine was thought to be suffering from an excess of blood. Leeches, by removing blood, were thought to help with these kinds of conditions — a wide range which included illnesses like polio and laryngitis. (wikipedia)

• 24A: One-half of a golf partnership, perhaps (PRO) — if there's one thing I don't care for, besides CASINOs, it's golf. What the hell is a "golf partnership," I wondered for a second or two, Then I remembered that PRO-Am tournaments existed. Professional + amateur. There's your partnership. 
• 66A: Some colorful plastic items in the seasonal aisle in the spring (EGGS) — this is almost timely. Semi-timely. The Lenten season began yesterday (Ash Wednesday) and it will end on Easter, the day of colorful plastic eggs! (you fill these with candy, and put them in Easter Egg Baskets for kids, or whomever—such a bizarre ritual for the holiest day on the Christian calendar). 

• 38A: Makes noise like an electric fan (WHIRRS) — turns out I have no idea what the difference is between one-R WHIR and two-R WHIRR. Turns out there isn't one—WHIRR(S) is just a variant (less common, acc. to merriam-webster dot com)
• 38D: Dickens and Dickinson (WRITERS) — we're well past the middle of February and I'm still reading Dombey & Son! I started on Jan. 1 but then my blog fundraiser started and then my semester started (lots of other reading to do) and then I visited my daughter and now I have a cold ... and while having a cold might seem like the perfect time to plow through Dickens, I, sadly, have a pile of papers to grade. The goal is to be done by month's end. I'm over 700 pages in now, so ... let's see, that leaves just ... hmm, looks like well over 200 pages to go still. I really love it! It's just ... long. And my copy is falling apart. I had to duct tape it together, but it's still on the verge of disintegration at every moment. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Biblical name for Syria / WED 2-18-26 / Offensively odorous / ___ Aran, heroine of Nintendo's Metroid / Demon of Japanese folklore / Reduced to crumbs, say / Leader of the Sharks in "West Side Story" / Like some buns and bedrooms / One of the "six enemies of the mind," in Hinduism / Bluish-purple bloom

Constructor: Victor Schmitt

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: emoji puns — theme clues are emojis; theme answers are familiar expressions that are also figurative ways of describing those emojis:

Theme answers:

• SIGNS OF THE TIMES (21A: 🕰️⏳⏰)
• SYMBOLIC GESTURES (39A: 🤙👏👋)
• FIGURES OF SPEECH (57A: 💬🗣️🗯️) 

Word of the Day: COMMODORES (12D: Best-selling home computers of the 1980s) —

The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, with independent estimates placing the number sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595 (equivalent to $1,940 in 2024). Preceded by the VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kibibytes (65,536 bytes) of RAM. [...] The C64 dominated the low-end computer market (except in the UK, France and Japan, lasting only about six months in Japan) for most of the later years of the 1980s.^[8] For a substantial period (1983–1986), the C64 had between 30% and 40% share of the US market and two million units sold per year, outselling IBM PC compatibles, the Apple II, and Atari 8-bit computers. [...] Part of the Commodore 64's success was its sale in regular retail stores instead of only electronics or computer hobbyist specialty stores. Commodore produced many of its parts in-house to control costs, including custom integrated circuit chips from MOS Technology. In the United States, it has been compared to the Ford Model T automobile for its role in bringing a new technology to middle-class households via creative and affordable mass-production. (wikipedia) 

• • •

I was recoiling from this one right from the start. Ugliness in the NW corner is a real tone-setter, and though I'm not sure I'd call that corner "ugly," exactly, it's real wobbly. AMES and RANDB are hoary repeaters, and when I had to change NOPE to (ugh) "NOT I" (3D: Terse denial), I was fairly confident that this puzzle was NOT going to be for I. Moved over one section and was subjected to ALDO ARAM LOCO (and ACUTE, which, as clued, I really only know (from years of French) as AIGU). And then one over again and I've got AAS, plural PASTAS, something called SAMUS (20A: ___ Aran, heroine of Nintendo's Metroid), the gosh dang AGORA (hoariest of repeaters). By the time I got to ESPIAL (lol come on) I was ready to throw in the towel. I got the first themer fairly easy, and I guess the concept is OK (those are all "signs" related to telling "time"), but it didn't strike me as particularly funny. Also, of all the themers, SIGNS OF THE TIMES is the worst in the plural. The others seem very comfortable in the plural, but I'm fairly certain I've mostly only heard "Sign of the Times" in the singular (I may be under the heavy influence of the Prince album Sign O' the Times here, but ... that's OK, I can't think of very many albums I'd rather be under the influence of). The theme was pretty straightforward. Meanwhile, the unpleasant fill just kept coming. In the end, not enough highs in the theme material, and quite a lot of lows in the fill. FICA USDA EHOW ... an ERR and ERE that are actually holding hands and screaming for attention rather than hiding in the corners and trying to stay inconspicuous, as they should (40D: Old-fashioned word that's a homophone of 49-Across). The theme itself is solid enough. Kind of dull, but at least average for the NYTXW. But the fill really weighed it down. NOISOME fill. Not quite the DREGS, but dreggish. 

I know SAMUS was in the puzzle last year some time (Mar. 1, it turns out). I remember not knowing SAMUS. Well, I re-didn't know it today. Also forgot which variety of "O"-ending crosswordese Gucci was. ERNO? ENZO? Had to wait for crosses, one of which was ARAM (??), which ... it's been a while (6A: Biblical name for Syria). The only way I know ARAM is from the William Saroyan novel My Name Is ARAM, and the only reason I know that is that I grew up in Fresno, CA (where Saroyan is from ... there is (or was) a theater named after him and everything). The Biblical ARAM I know only from crosswords, but I clearly don't "know" it since I needed crosses coming up with it today. If it seems unfamiliar to you, here, let me give you a quick visual explanation of why:

[xwordinfo]

This chart shows ARAM appearances over time. The blue is where Shortz took over. Look at that ARAM supply just get (rightly) choked off right around the turn of the century. From eleven appearances a year in the mid-'90s to just once in the last decade in 2026 (before today). This is what I mean about the grid feeling like it's weighed down by olden gunk. It all feels very familiar to me, but that's because I started solving in the '90s, when ARAMs were (sadly) plentiful. There's no cause for ARAM now. There's especially no cause in a little section of a not-terribly-demanding grid. Anyway, after I got out of the ALDO / ARAM / SAMUS triangle, nothing held me up much, except (briefly) those awful four-letter government initialisms (plural!) (USDA, FICA). I really thought things were picking up slightly in the south when I got NOXIOUS (a cool word!) (51A: Offensively odorous) ... only it wasn't NOXIOUS, it was NOISOME (a much less cool word). I think HUMDINGERS is my favorite thing in the grid—ironic, given that it's as olde-timey as a lot of this fill, but at least it has style and personality. I don't know in what world you choose a computer clue for COMMODORES over a musical clue, but I guess it's this world. Unfathomable. I actually didn't mind learning a little bit about the history of the Commodore 64 (see "Word of the Day," above), but if you bring out the COMMODORES for the first time in 42 years, it oughta be Lionel Richie & Co. and they better be playing something (seriously, three COMMODORES clues all time and none of them use the band? Just the name of Vanderbilt athletes and computers? Filing a discrimination suit right now).

[man, early music videos were wild (by which I mean tame, low-budget, adorable)]

Bullets:

• 70A: Reduced to crumbs, say (EATEN) — if you're eating a cookie, I guess, but "say" I'm eating steak? 
• 5D: Leader of the Sharks in "West Side Story" (BERNARDO) — the puzzle continues to overestimate how well I'll remember roles in old movies / musicals. I know Spielberg remade this very recently, but still, no hope for me here without crosses. Those crosses weren't hard to come by, and so eventually I ESPIALed BERNARDO. [Note: this is the 23rd ESPIAL of all time, and the thirteenth time it's been clued [Observation]—interestingly, ESPIAL has not been favored more in one time period than another. No time period seems to want it—it appears more than once in a calendar year just twice (1942, 1969)]
• 29D: Demon of Japanese folklore (ONI) — I don't love ONI as fill, but this Japanese-demon way of cluing ONI is by far the best way I've seen. Before the 2020s, most ONI clues referred to the Office of Naval Intelligence (e.g. [Clandestine maritime org.] or [The Navy's C.I.A.]). Occasionally, you'd get a partial. For a very brief period in 1994, Shortz experimented with cluing "ONI" as if it were "ON-ONE" ([1-___ (way to guard)], [2 ___ (doubled teamed)]. He gave that up pretty quickly, which was probably the right move. Nowadays, since 2020, Japanese demon is the standard reference.

[this ONI is preparing to squeegee your windshield. Terrifying!]

• 42D: ___ Howard, Oscar-nominated actor for 2005's "Hustle & Flow" (TERRENCE) — I knew this, but for some reason TERRENCE + "Oscar-nominated" made me think I was dealing with a different cinematic TERRENCE altogether. Turns out I was thinking of TERENCE (one-"R") Blanchard (Academy Award-nominated composer of the scores for BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods) 

That’s all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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